


A Coma in a Classroom

by stanchezsloppyseconds



Series: Interdimensional Janitors [2]
Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Corpses, Gen, Minor Character Death, death mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-19 09:27:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12407661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stanchezsloppyseconds/pseuds/stanchezsloppyseconds
Summary: "Whatever you do d-don't look it in the eyes!" The words had been in his own voice, but seemed distant and nearly unintelligible as his vision spun. It was like falling slow through thick liquid until abruptly it wasn't anymore and he startled to attention, sitting awkwardly cramped in a child-sized school desk, his arms locked in shackles to the tabletop. Disoriented and heart pumping so hard he could feel it trying to break free from the confines of his chest, Ricardo pulled at the shackles desperately to no avail. He didn't know what was happening but he knew he had to get out.A brief one shot about a clean up job gone wrong featuring my Janitor Ricks.





	A Coma in a Classroom

* * *

 

 

_"Whatever you do d-don't look it in the eyes!"_

  
The words had been in his own voice, but seemed distant and nearly unintelligible as his vision spun. It was like falling slow through thick liquid until abruptly it wasn't anymore and he startled to attention, sitting awkwardly cramped in a child-sized school desk, his arms locked in shackles to the tabletop. Disoriented and heart pumping so hard he could feel it trying to break free from the confines of his chest, Ricardo pulled at the shackles desperately to no avail. He didn't know what was happening but he knew he had to get out.

 

"Mr. Sanchez, eyes up front," a blurry shadowed figure demanded. That name had always sounded wrong to him. Mr. Sanchez was his father.

  
Looking up at the front of the room Ricardo watched as the darkness morphed into the familiar scowl of one of his high school teachers. The front of the room became a chalk board. He slid down into the seat of the desk out of old habit, trying to hide, and it become less cramped than it had been a moment before. Eyes leaving the chalkboard, he glanced back down at himself to find his clothes had changed from his usual personalized work uniform to the button down shirt and sweater of his old Catholic school uniform. His hands looked small and soft like they belonged to a kid, and with a nervous lick he felt the edges of braces on his teeth. He closed his eyes and told himself to snap out of it. This couldn't be real. Either he was having a really bad trip backstage after a concert, or he was hooked up to some terrible simulation. He wasn't fourteen and in that hellhole of a school anymore. It was hard to concentrate on his thoughts when everything around him felt so real, but he clung to the memory of running away from that life at sixteen and never going back. He'd never really stopped running until the last few years. Now he was thirty nine and worked for the Citad--

  
"I said eyes up front!" the teacher hissed though the voice had shifted pitch and gotten a tin insectoid buzz to it. When he opened his eyes there was a gromflomite standing over his desk wearing his teacher's matronly clothes. It was pointing a ray gun at him but he felt himself bubble with laughter as the alien awkwardly maneuvered in the confines of the nun's black dress.

  
"Oh-okay you admittedly h-had me for a moment there but really? Is th-this supposed to fr-frighten me?" Ricardo's higher pitched teenage voice cracked awkwardly as it dropped back to his normal tone. The desk shrank again beneath him as he changed back to normal. Then the classroom faded away and the shadowy figures shifted as they regrouped and changed strategy.

  
_"Would you hur-hurry up and snap out of it! Could use some help here!"_

  
"Working on it, Dick," Ricardo muttered in reply to his coworker though he doubted Richard could hear him, "C’mon, I got w-w-worse nightmares than that. Why don't we skip the baby stuff and you try hitting me with your best sh--"

  
Before he could finish the darkness hit the air out of him with a heavy wave, and again he felt submerged in a sludge struggling for breath. It was disorienting and left him gasping frantically with his heart beating hard in his ears the moment he broke surface, this time wet and shivering- completely drenched in blood. Judging from the endless ocean of corpses he was still half buried in, it was his own.

  
"Th-that's mm-more like it." Ricardo sputtered as he spat out a mouthful of blood. Propping am arm on the chest of a corpse that looked like the Class 4 SID they cleaned up last week, he tried to hoist his way out from under the other dead Ricks. As he pushed onto the body though it broke apart under his weight, crumbling oddly into blood soaked kernelled chunks. It took a moment for it to register, but when it did Ricardo felt his gut twist and vomit nearly come up his throat as he tossed aside the bloody cob of corn he was holding.

  
"Okay we're cranking shit up t-to eleven now a-a--are we? Gon-gonna throw in some wicker furniture and pirates too while you’re at it?"

  
Ricardo tried a second time to pull himself upwards only to sink further into a crumbling quicksand of bloody corn and dead bodies. It was getting harder to breathe as he was pulled deeper, the bodies crushing him till he could barely move.

  
Then all at once he opened his eyes and they were gone. He was all that was left, still drenched in his own blood and pinned to the ground motionless. He could hear the sound of boots walking up to him, but not even his eyes could move from the fixated spot of darkness they stared out at.

  
"Cause of death?" it was his own voice. No, correction, it was Richard's. Crouching down for a better look, his coworker filled his frozen viewpoint with an unimpressed scowl as he inspected him. "--Being an idiotic waste of a Rick."

  
Ricardo wanted to yell that he was obviously not dead, but couldn't make a sound.

  
"At least now maybe the Council might see fit to give me an aac-actually qualified partner." Richard scoffed. Did that asshole just fucking smile? Well the joke was on him cause Ricardo was gonna deck him for that comment the moment whatever had happened wore off.

  
_Hey! Hey what the hell? Dick, you put that fucking body bag back where you got it!_

  
His body was stiff with what had to be false rigor mortis as Richard shifted him into the bag and zipped it up. With a grunt Richard dragged him up onto the gurney that they loaded with bodies every day. There was the familiar chill of passing through a portal and he knew what would come next as he was wheeled down the twisting hallways of the bio waste facility towards the incinerator. Ricardo felt the searing of flames licking at the foot of the body bag and the terror of dying finally sunk in.

  
Then he felt a sharp and very real wallop to the head.

  
"Wake up and help me clean this mess you useless piece of shit!" Richard commanded as Ricardo groaned and curled up instinctively to hide from what had hit him.

  
"Wha-what happened?" groggily propping himself up on one elbow, Ricardo slowly took in his surroundings. It was night and they seemed to be out in the middle of some alien forest full of strangely phallic looking trees. Not far from them was the mangled remains of a dead Rick alongside the corpse of a large slimy beast that looked like it had picked the wrong fight to start with Richard’s scalpel.

 

“Zorchronian Basilisk. They feed on fear, in-induced in their prey with a hypnotic trance that causes nightmares. I told you to watch out cause the tracks were fresh and it was likely to come back for dessert.” Richard said with a heavy frown, “But of course you had your damn headphones on and l-looked the fucking thing dead in the eyes before I could stop you.”

 

“Oh… so like a gremloblin?” Ricardo asked as he got up trying to shake the ghost feeling of burning out of his legs.

 

“With a name that stupid I’m gonna assume that is something from your adventures in Disneyland.” Richard replied as he cleaned alien monster blood off his equipment.

 

“Uh- h-hey Dick, how do I er- how do I know I’m not still dreaming?” This felt real, but so had parts of the dream. The sweat soaking his shirt was reminiscent of the blood he’d thought he’d been drenched in moments earlier.

 

“You have d-dreams with me in them often?”

 

“Yeah actually.” When this earned him a questioning look, Ricardo quickly backtracked “Er. I mean- not like- gross. I have work dreams a lot. Don’t you?”

 

“Hm.” that wasn’t really an answer but Ricardo didn’t press further on it. They started cleaning up the half eaten Rick remains they’d come to retrieve tech from and the concern of still being in a dream slowly faded, replaced instead with the stark normalized horror of their daily routine.   


End file.
